Hearing Hate Speech: force, violence and institutional frameworks
Charlotte Louise Armstrong · White Rose eTheses Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) · 2019
Hate speech is on the rise. Its threat grows daily. Increasingly, reports of hate speech enter our daily news, researchers make it a focus of study, legislators create laws to protect us from it, and people fall victim to it. The sites of conflict which hate speech creates are difficult and confused; deliberately so. Such language does not languish on the extremes of accepted discourse occasionally breaking through at accidental points of destructive horror. Instead, it stalks the foundations of discourse, relentlessly seeks power, and infiltrates institutional frameworks, in order to continually promote violence and division. Hate speech is condemned and yet, it thrives, casting what seems like a growing shadow over spaces of communication. This thesis journeys from the historical conditions from which the current concept of hate speech has evolved, to the established and conventional structures that ensure the continued ability of these utterances to inflict appalling harms. The language of hate respects no boundaries, arbitrary or otherwise. And so, engagement with thinkers across disciplines is necessary to draw together the elusive and disingenuous character of this language. The combined might of philosophers, linguists, legal scholars, gender theorists, sociologists, and race theorists is needed to illuminate the dark spaces of hate speech. These often complex and diverse academic theories - that are shown to be relevant to the hate speech debate - are drawn together through examples of the utterances themselves observed in areas such as; politics, literature, theatre, social media, news reports, and legal cases. Ultimately, the argument is made that the violence of hate speech is not accidental. It is intentionally reinforced by state institutional frameworks.